A new American Integrative Grand Strategy in the Indo-Pacific under the Biden Administration: Multilevel Leadership

This lecture is organized in cooperation with the Graduate School in Asian Studies and Euvip. 

As challenges to the values and norms of the international order keep emerging, the presentation analyses the tools that the Biden administration has mobilised to avoid further marginalizing challenging voices of the rule based order. Despite recognizing the transitional stage in which the global order is, and the creation and strengthening of ideational margins within it, few studies have looked at the impact of adapting American grand strategy on international social processes, particularly to reduce these margins. The presentation thus aims at answering the following question: how has the Biden administration influenced the regional Indo-Pacific social processes by adjusting its grand strategy at a time when the role of the US is increasingly contested?

The study hypothesizes that the Biden administration has adapted its policies in order to impact current processes of socialization in order to continue to lead regionally (and systemically).  Building upon the English school (in particular pluralism and solidarism) and leadership theory the paper presents the accommodation process applied by the American administration with allies and partners, swing states and  and deviant members in the region. In fine, the analysis explains how the US developed an integrative multilevel type of leadership in its grand strategy. This form of American leadership, characterized by co-ordinating leadership of varying types and varying degrees, although less dominant is more pragmatic and acceptable to others and far more subtle in the Indo-Pacific region.

Bio: Tanguy Struye is Professor of International Relations at UCLouvain where he teaches several international relations courses, in particular in the fields of geopolitics, geoeconomics, emerging powers and international relations theory.His research interests focus on the concept of grand strategy, the US-China relationship, the Indo-Pacific region, cognitive warfare. 

He has supervised many PhD students and been director of the Centre d’études des crises et conflits internationaux at UCL between 2016-2022. Together with Professor Tanguy de Wilde, he was awarded the Baillet-Latour Chair in 2009 (2009-2018), a chair dedicated to EU-China relations. He has published several books, book chapters and scientific articles. He is the editor of the collection Scène internationale at the Presses universitaires de Louvain. In 2020, he was appointed by the Belgian Minister of Defense to co-coordinate the Defense’s Strategic Committee in charge of updating the 2016 Strategic Vision, overseeing the work of 12 experts and external advisors in international security and Belgian defense policy.